The Good Son

by Russel D. McLean

  “Of course.”

  “All things considered… Harry seems quite happy to forget the incident.”

  “I am, as well.”

  “He should be out in a few minutes.”

  Rachel nodded. “Thank you.”

  As Susan slipped back inside again, she nodded curtly in my direction. “Steed,” she said. I remembered when the name had been friendly, like a kind of private joke between us. This time, it sounded more like a habit. The only name she could think to call me.

  Rachel looked at me strangely. “You were friends. Better friends than—”

  “Emphasis on the ‘were’.”

  “You want to tell me what ‘Steed’ is all about?”

  I shrugged, made light of it. “As in Patrick MacNee. The Avengers.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  She studied me for a few seconds. “You don’t strike me as an umbrella man. And you’re definitely not one for nicknames.”

  “Guess that’s why it kind of faded away.”

  “For some people,” she said.

  I couldn’t meet her gaze. I felt oddly embarrassed, as though she’d read something into the nickname she shouldn’t have.

  “I’m sorry I called you out.”

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  She shook her head. “But I am. This was nothing and I know…”

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “We always used to ask her how she could stand you,” Rachel said. A smile tugged at her lips, faintly nostalgic. “I mean, how she could take the hot and cold running emotion…” She caught my gaze, held it as though trying to see if I understood what she was talking about. “One minute, you’re there in the bosom of the family and the next you won’t even talk to any of us. Even those of us who know that it wasn’t your fault.”

  I couldn’t do anything but shrug in response to that. Guilty as charged. And nothing I could do about it, either.

  The door opened. Harry stumbled out, hugged his wife. “You all right?”

  She murmured something and held him tight.

  I stood back.

  When they stepped apart, Harry extended his hand. “McNee,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Aye.”

  “Since the funeral.”

  I thought about punching his lights out. Instead, I nodded. “I hear you restrained yourself tonight.”

  He tried looking genial. “All of that’s behind me.”

  “Aye?”

  “We should get home,” Rachel said. “It’s been a long night.”

  Harry looked at me as though expecting a parting shot. I gave him nothing.

  Rachel kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  By the time I even thought about replying, they were out of earshot.

  Chapter 9

  My mobile rang the next morning, dragging me from sleep. I reached out and grabbed the phone off the table.

  “It looks like I no longer require your services, Mr McNee,” Robertson said.

  I answered blearily, “I was going to call you later today, hand over my report on—”

  “My brother, the London gangster? I know, Mr McNee. Kat — his girlfriend — she told me all about it.”

  “Mr Robertson, I was holding off until I could confirm certain information. You wanted to know why your brother committed suicide?”

  “I know everything I need to know, McNee. The bastard topped himself because he finally took responsibility for who he was. How much more does a man need to know than what she had to tell me? What, you were wanting to see if you could find anything else? Because you weren’t already sure he’d become a bloody monster, aye? Like there was some deeper reason for him to go hang himself? You’re a bloody parasite. Spinning this thing out so you could keep taking my money.”

  I wasn’t so sure about the reasons Daniel Robertson had killed himself, but I kept quiet. I didn’t know how to tell his brother that I didn’t think Daniel felt any remorse for the people he’d hurt, the terrible things he’d done.

  “You deliver your report, McNee,” he said. “And I’ll pay yer bloody bills.”

  Five minutes later, in the shower, my thoughts began to organise themselves.

  DI Lindsay and his little visit to my office, warning me off the case.

  Everything raising my suspicions.

  The shower battered the paranoia out of my brain.

  And then, out of nowhere, I found myself thinking about Constable Susan Bright. How she looked when I saw her in the hospital. Distance in her eyes. Maybe even a kind of hatred.

  Not that I could blame her.

  Memories…

  Of skin slick with sweat and a sick guilt that crept up on me in the night.

  In the hospital, Rachel had called her cold. But there had been a time when Susan would greet me with fond affection.

  Before I fucked her over.

  Out of the shower, I towelled down. Dressed for the day.

  My leg was stiff. My crutches sat in a cupboard, waiting.

  I pulled them out, thinking; maybe just for a day or two. Take the load off.

  But I had to walk on my own. Who needed a crutch?

  The phone rang again.

  “Get your arse over here, now,” Lindsay said.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Park Place, you cocky shite. Now. There’s a woman here, and let me tell you, pal, she’s got your fuckin’ number.”

  The entrance was sealed off with crime scene tape. Beat officers scurried about like someone was going to kick their arses if they dared stand still.

  The building itself was nothing to write home about. No security entrance. Old fashioned sash windows, one of the upper floors using cellophane instead of glass. The kind of place the tourist board keeps out of the brochures.

  A constable clamped a beefy hand on my shoulder. His weight made me buckle, almost sent me down. I’d left the crutches at home. “You can’t go in there.”

  “I’m here to see DI Lindsay.” Keep standing. Make it look natural.

  “Name?” He reminded me of Lurch from the Addams family. Same monosyllabic sentence structure. Same stature. His hair was combed forward in a mock-Beatles cut. His large nose jutted out from his face like a badly chipped lump of granite.

  I gave him my full name. He nodded slowly. “Aye, he said you’d be here.”

  We walked up to the second floor.

  The door of the flat had been knocked off its hinges. Green paint peeled, revealing the dirty white undercoat. There had been a number painted on the letterbox once, but it had faded to a ghostly imprint. The wooden surround was splintered and cracked.

  Lindsay was smoking a cigarette. The scent was strong, but couldn’t mask the dank musk of the close’s natural odour. The bags under his eyes told me he hadn’t got much sleep the night before. So did the rumpled suit, the same one he’d been wearing yesterday.

  “Glad you could make it.”

  Aye, I thought. That’ll be right.

  “What do you want?”

  He dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out with his heel. “Come in.” Lifted the yellow tape.

  I followed him down the corridor. The wallpaper was off-white. Faint pale-yellow stripes ran from ceiling to floor. No photos on the wall. No personal touches. No carpets, even.

  A smell lingered in the air: rotten, acidic.

  He took me into what must have been the living room. The same wallpaper. A raggedy sofa was pushed back against the far wall. A small, black and white TV balanced on a wooden box under the window. The rug that was chucked down in the middle of the room was thick and dirty with decorative Chinese symbols woven into the fabric.

  And dumped on that: the body.

  Face down. Arms and legs uncomfortably twisted. Abandoned with little thought for aesthetics.

  A man in protective plastics snapped away at the scene with his camera.

  “Anyone you know?” Lind
say asked.

  The woman who had called herself Kat had been left half-naked. Her upper body was a mess of ugly bruising and vicious, open wounds.

  I walked round the rug, treating the edges like a barrier I couldn’t cross.

  The back of her head was a mess of blood and bone. It was hard to equate with anything that had once been a human skull.

  It was only when I saw her face that my stomach tried to escape through my throat.

  There was a ragged hole in her head, just above the bridge of her nose. The edges were blackened with dried blood and powder residue. Below that, her eyes were open.

  “We found your card,” said Lindsay. “On the carpet next to her. Someone wanted us to see it. What was she to you? A client?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “She could have picked up my card anywhere.” Lying instinctively. Lindsay had a way of bringing out the worst in me.

  “So you’re saying you didn’t know this woman?”

  I stepped forward but Lindsay placed a hand on my chest, stopped me from approaching her. “You can’t interfere with a crime scene while the geeks are examining the area.” The guy with the camera glanced up, irritation and insult plain on his face.

  “I did know her,” I admitted. “At least I’ve met her once before.”

  Lindsay didn’t seem fazed that I’d lied to him earlier. “Care to share?”

  In the office, she’d seemed nervous. Perhaps her death had not been entirely unexpected.

  I told him what I could.

  “This old tart was Daniel Robertson’s… girlfriend?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “This… old tart.” I could have lamped him. She deserved some respect in death. But I knew I had to pick my battles, and nothing would be accomplished by pulling Lindsay up on respect. Empathy wasn’t high on his list of personality traits.

  Of course, personality wasn’t exactly up there, either.

  “So why come to you?”

  A good question.

  “She must have traced Daniel here, somehow. Maybe she thought he’d be coming back home.”

  Lindsay regarded me with a strange expression. “So she came up here because she thought lover boy had jilted her? She wanted to confront him? Give him a smack in the pus, maybe, tell him he was an arsehole, and then go home?”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  “Or she wanted to find him, try and talk some sense into the bawbag. Persuade him to come home. Aye, I suppose that could be it. Daniel Robertson was a real catch.”

  “Love is funny like that,” I said. “Makes you do strange things.”

  Lindsay didn’t reply. He kept looking at the body on the floor, blinking with every camera flash.

  I thought about James Robertson calling me earlier. Remembered his voice. The way he talked about her. That vicious tone.

  What did he think when he saw her? Dolled up in her fake furs, hiding her natural features beneath thick make-up. A mask, perhaps, but my client wouldn’t see it that way.

  The James Robertson I knew was a conservative thinker. Judged on appearance, used his own self-image as a moral yardstick. This woman would never have met his expectations. But then, Daniel Robertson’s life seemed to be entirely at odds with his brother’s ideals.

  The photographer finished his work and stepped back, letting two other men in surgical gear approach. They unrolled a stretcher, lifted her body. She looked unreal. Oddly artificial.

  When they took her out of the room, acid churned in my stomach. My mind flashed on a similar scene. Feelings that had left me hollowed out and empty.

  Lindsay said, “So you were the one introduced her to the brother?”

  I nodded. Told him about their meeting the night before.

  “You were with them when they met?”

  “No. I offered my services, but this was something he had to do on his own.”

  “Did he say where they were going to meet?”

  “Mennies. On the Perth Road.”

  Lindsay knew the pub, nodded. Seemed to wait on me saying something more.

  I locked eyes with him. “Something else you want?”

  Lindsay shook his head. “You’re free to go.” I made to walk past him, but he grabbed me roughly by the elbow. “Stay available. We’re done talking for now. But I have a feeling we’ll talk again soon enough.”

  I shook off his grip. “It’s a date,” I said and resisted the urge to give him the finger on my way out the door.

  On the street, I walked round the corner and leaned against the brick wall of a building for support. My leg had caught fire and I felt close to tears.

  Chapter 10

  I was leaning against the stone dyke that ran along the banks of the Tay. I looked left, down the length of the road bridge that spanned the water. On the far banks of the river, small towns nestled peacefully in the Fife countryside. Newport, Tayport, others.

  The air that came in off the river carried a gentle tang; an unobtrusive scent skimming from the surface of the water. I breathed it in.

  Gulls flew above the water, cackling like lunatics.

  I turned my gaze to the rail bridge which stood further west, down the meandering path of the river.

  The original bridge had collapsed in 1879, barely a year after construction had finished. A storm shook the bridge’s foundation and a passenger train had plunged into the darkness of the water below.

  The train itself was later dredged from the river and, amazingly, returned to active service. Its passengers were not so lucky. Sometimes, when I walked by the river at night and the moon was just right, I saw the victims of the disaster shifting below the surface of the water, reaching up towards the surface, their fingers clawed and their faces stretched in terror.

  Today was a beautiful day, however, and the waters were calm. Any ghosts lurking below the surface were quiet. Maybe they were even content down there in the peaceful deep. It would have been easy to join them. Simply close my eyes and go to sleep as the water gently flowed around me.

  I pushed such thoughts away, pulled out my mobile and dialled through to the daytime number Robertson had given me.

  “Aye?” he said.

  “It’s me.”

  “I’m not paying a penny till I see that report, McNee.”

  “Have the police contacted you?”

  “No. Why?”

  I took a deep breath. “We need to talk. Are you at home?”

  “I’m in town.”

  “Where are you now?” I asked. When he told me, I said, “I’ll meet you at the café in Tesco by the Riverside. Five minutes.”

  When I hung up, my mind flashed on Kat’s corpse. Closed in on details I could never have seen.

  Fist against flesh.

  A knife slicked with blood.

  Her eyes wide with fear.

  The muzzle of a gun pressed hard against her forehead, whitening the surrounding skin.

  My muscles tightened. My breathing became harsh.

  It was a familiar sensation, one I thought I had left behind long ago. The world drifted away. My muscles contracted. Leaving me with fingers and toes curled into tight fists that refused to open again.

  Pins and needles ran up and down my legs. Although I was leaning on the stone wall for support, it felt flimsy. Ready to collapse, send me hurtling over and into the water.

  I concentrated on the ice in my lungs. Forced myself to take each breath slowly and carefully. Ignoring the signals that my brain was sending, forcing me to take in shallow gulps of oxygen.

  I focused on the cold stone beneath my hands. Made that sensation my anchor to reality. One thing to keep me conscious of where I was and what was happening.

  Slowly, my senses came back. The bubbles in my head popped. My breathing, still ragged, slowed and the ice in my lungs melted. The pain left me. My hands and feet tingled as though alive with electricity.

  How long since I had felt like this?

  Hard to recall. Sinc
e I was teenager? Later?

  I remembered the doctor calling it “growing pains” and when I reached my twenties, it was easy to believe he’d been right. So why, if that was true, had it come back now?

  As if I needed to look hard for the answer to that.

  I moved the weight off my left leg.

  I bit my lower lip. The wind grew cold.

  My imagination?

  Chapter 11

  Robertson bit into the bacon roll. Flour exploded. Tomato sauce oozed. Teeth clamped hard. I thought of a knife-edge tearing through Kat’s skin. Around us, families relaxed in the middle of their weekly shop. High windows on three sides of the café let natural light into the building. The coffee machine kept up a constant background noise.

  I sipped at my coffee: boiled water. No bite.

  Robertson chewed and swallowed. “So tell me,” he said. As his lips moved I saw flecks of sauce and meat on his teeth. “Why do the police want to talk to me?”

  “Tell me what happened the other night.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Told you everything you needed to know over the phone.”

  “She told you about the man your brother became,” I said. “A criminal. A brawler, a drug dealer, maybe worse.”

  “I’m not a violent man. But keep talking that way about Daniel and maybe that’ll be put to the test.”

  Two tables away, a baby started to cry. Its mother, a young woman with peroxide-blonde hair and giant, gold-hooped earrings, tried to quiet it by forcing a bottle against the child’s lips. Its screams pierced my ears. I wanted to get up, shake the little bastard, get him to shut his face.

  I concentrated on what my client had to tell me.

  Professionalism.

  I leaned across the table.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Robertson put down his roll. “What’s this about?”

  “Tell me.”

  He looked ready to protest again, but his expression softened.

  And he told me.